title: Automatic distance measurement of abdominal aorta for ultrasonography-based visceral fat estimation.
abstract: Ultrasonography-based visceral fat estimation is a promising method to assess central obesity, which is associated with metabolic syndrome. The key to this method is to measure three types of distance in the ultrasound image. The most important one is the distance from the skin surface to the posterior wall of the abdominal aorta. We present a novel automatic measurement method to calculate this distance using 1D ultrasound signal processing. It is different from the conventional 2D image processing based methods which have high failure rate when the target is blurred or partially imaged. The proposed method identifies the waveforms of the aorta along a group of ultrasound scan lines and a rating mechanism is introduced to choose the best waveform for distance calculation. The robustness and accuracy of the method were evaluated by experiments based on clinical data.
authors.forename: Junchen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: You
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Norihiro
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Koizumi
authors.forename: Naoto
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Kubota
authors.forename: Takeharu
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Asano
authors.forename: Kuzuhito
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Yuhashi
authors.forename: Tsuyoshi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Mitake
authors.forename: Kazunori
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Itani
authors.forename: Toshiaki
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Takahashi
authors.forename: Shigemi
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Takeishi
authors.forename: Shiro
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sasaki
authors.forename: Takashi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kadowaki
authors.forename: Ichiro
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Sakuma
authors.forename: Hongen
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Liao
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001011:Aorta / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D001012:Aorta, Abdominal / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D016477:Artifacts; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D050152:Intra-Abdominal Fat / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D024821:Metabolic Syndrome / Q000175:diagnosis; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed; D014463:Ultrasonography